My Eagles Going Down

Tough week for the Bender. Wednesday night I was minding my own business, patiently waiting for the Pats game this Sunday, when out of nowhere I was blindsided by the news that BCs basketball season was over. BC Kicked Sean Williams and Akida McClain off the team. Sean Williams is perhaps the most talented player they've had since Dana Barros, but I guess his off the court indescretions were too much for Al skinner to put up with, so instead of a possible ACC championship run they'll now be lucky if they make the NCAA tournament. Williams will no doubt go home and get ready for the NBA draft, where he'll still be a firt round choice although his chances at being a lottery pick, whereas Akida McClain will probably transfer somewhere and finish out his college career and head to Europe for a few years. BC isn;t saying exactly what happened, most likely they want to protect the kids' reputations, but speculation is running wild, and I can;t help but think that the rumors will be a lot worse than the reality. So BC will just have to settle for being a team that does things the right way, as opposed to a team who is playing into the sweet sixteen this coming March. They must've done something really wrong to get kicked off, when you consider all the things they put up with from Jermaine Watson, Andrew Bryant and Ryan Sidney, but for now I'm of the opinion that they should've kept them on til the end of the season and told them to move on this summer, if you wanted to protect their reputations, that would be the best way.

OK, onto one of my favorite subjects, steroids. Sammy Sosa is making a comeback, and I'm gonna give my exact theory on why. Sosa was of course one of the most obvious steroid users over the last ten years, and when the MLB put in their supposed tougher policies, he panicked and got off the juice. He wasn;t the only one to do so, Pudge Rodriguez, Bret Boone and Jason Giambi also reacted this way, and quickly they became far inferior to their previous selves. Sammy went from being one of the most feared power hitters of his generation to an undersized left-fielder who looked and hit like a base-stealing second baseman. The smarter players like Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield, knew that the designer steroids they were using were cutting edge and couldn;t be caught by current tests, so long as the did it correctly. A quick look at the lack of players caught in the NFL showed that the mad scientists making steroids could easily beat a urine test. So the players who had kicked the habit had three choices. First option destroy their reputations by looking smaller and not producing on the field. Second option, walk away from the game and pretend that the problem was they had gotten too old like so many players befoer them. Third option, get back on the juice and reclaim their past glory. So really all that has happened is that Sammy, Like Giambi before him, is back on the juice, and he's gonna have a pretty good year with The Rangers, I'm predicting 30 homers and 90 RBIs, if not better.

I wanted to comment on the recent coaching developments in the NFL. Cam Cameron, the offensive coordiator for The Chargers, was hired by the Dolphins, and this is great news for the rest of the AFC East. If you had to point to the number one reason that The Patriots beat The Chargers last weekend, it was because Cam Cameron didn;t just run the ball all day with saLTy. He went for style points and mixed in the passing game, unltimately opening the door for the Pats to pull off the upset. Really Cameron was a guy who looked like a genius because he had the best running back in the game and the best tight end around as well. I'm not gonna complete write them off, maybe he has really good organizational skills, and he'll hire a great staff, but for now I think the Dolphins have made a big mistake. Of course it could be worse, The Raiders have endured just the latest of their many recent public embarassments. Steve Sarkisian, who by all acounts was a huge stretch as a head coaching choice to begin with, turned them down. The Raiders really need to change the man in charge, Al Davis was once a great team president, but now he's just a bad punchline. Until someone takes over for Al, The Raiders will be stuck at the bottom.

Lastly I had to weigh in on this ridiculous situation in connecticut where a substitute teacher could receive 40 years in prison because some pornographic pop-ups appeared on her screen while she was teaching, which undoubtedly has scarred these middle school students. The worst part of this story was that during the trial, the supposed "expert" gave false information to the jury, which was most likely due to the fact that he wasn't highly educated on the workings of the internet. But because he was brought in as a police expert, his testimony was trusted moreso than an actual expert testifying for the defense. I want to make clear that I don't support the showing of porn to little teens and tweens in school, but the idea that this poor woman will go to jail and will have to register as a sex offender because of internet pop-ups is bullshit.

Ok,

-Bender Out